The company is known for aggressively targeting the sort of small businesses which may have previously signed up with PayPal. Stripe’s co-founder John Collison described the company as “a programming language for payments”. Businesses can begin using it with as little as one line of code.

Stripe’s new bitcoin support is being rolled out slowly, and currently companies can only apply to join a closed beta test. But one service is already using the bitcoin functionality: Tarsnap, an encrypted backup service, was selected as the very first tester.

“Stripe’s support is crucial here,” says Colin Percival, the founder of Tarsnap. “I tell them I want to get paid X dollars in bitcoins, and they tell me how many bitcoins I should ask for and what address they should be sent to. Stripe then gives me the dollars I asked for (minus a small processing fee, of course).”

“This is the natural next step in the company’s plans to open up new markets for its users by allowing them to accept any currency or payment instrument their customers want to pay with,” said a Stripe spokeswoman.

“Bitcoin fits in nicely with Stripe’s product plan,” Collison told the Guardian before the announcement, “in that we want to help people accept payments from customers however those customers want to pay. And so credit cards are a good first thing to roll out because they have such widespread penetration, but we don’t bill ourselves as a credit card processing company, we’re a payments company.

“So whether it’s bitcoin, or whether it’s the various direct debit payment systems which are popular throughout Europe, or whether it’s M-pesa in Kenya, it totally makes sense, as more and more of our merchants are these borderless businesses selling to a global audience, to support what customers want to pay with.”